Handle with Care: Hazards and Wonders of Early Modern Greek Literature

Three eighteenth-century texts will serve as points of reference in an attempt to map some of the issues involved in the study of early modern Greek literature. These texts come with a number of challenges – philological, methodological, hermeneutic – while also being fascinating literary artifacts. At the very least, they require a kind of treatment that would do justice to the determined interplay of what this talk will identify as their key features: a creative engagement with classical forms and genres; a programmatic interest in European paradigms; and a firm grasp of the realities and exigencies of the Ottoman status quo.

Bio:

Nikos Panou is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Peter V. Tsantes Endowed Professor in Hellenic Studies at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University. Before moving to Stony Brook he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His current research focuses on the ways power and authority were conceptualized and represented in pre-modern philosophical discourse, with a particular emphasis on moral and political works written from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. He has published on topics ranging from Byzantine historiography to seventeenth-century satire.